


when he was alone

by softlyblue



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Loneliness, Post-Canon, cad talking abt his experiences in 130 really got me, im so happy hes finally letting himself acknowledge it was harmful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-20
Updated: 2021-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-29 02:22:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30149304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlyblue/pseuds/softlyblue
Summary: Caduceus always thought, growing up, that he was a crowded person. He contained multitudes. He woke up every morning in the same bed as Colton, and when Colton grew too long for their bed the Clay siblings spent a merry week making blankets and pulling woollens into a sort of a nest, pillows, old clothes that no longer fit, and all four of them slept in the same room. It got emptier.It was Caduceus and Clarabelle left, when Colton and Calliope had gone. They used to hug at night, head on the same pillow, and Caduceus would think:I am a crowded person. There is space in me for multitudes.And then he was alone.
Relationships: Caduceus Clay & Clay Family, Caduceus Clay & The Mighty Nein
Comments: 17
Kudos: 67





	when he was alone

**Author's Note:**

> cad angst cad angst cad angst

After the Somnovum, they go their separate ways. 

“This isn’t the end,” Veth promises them all with tears streaming down her cheeks, one hand in Caleb’s, the other clutching her husband like a lifeline, “Promise me?”

They all do. They spend several weeks in Nicodranas in the end, all of them, Veth and Yeza scoping out potential places to open up shop, Luc going absolutely wild with the attention, climbing all over Caduceus and demanding to see the whole city from this new and very exciting vantage point. Beau and Yasha leave for a few days and come back burnt lobster (Yasha) and browned (Beau), with sand in their eyes and laughter in their faces. Caleb and Essek sequester themselves in the Tide Peak Tower. Jester and Fjord spend a lot of time in the bay, fishing. 

But, broadly, after the Somnovum they go their separate ways. 

Caduceus always thought, growing up, that he was a crowded person. He contained multitudes. He woke up every morning in the same bed as Colton, and when Colton grew too long for their bed the Clay siblings spent a merry week making blankets and pulling woollens into a sort of a nest, pillows, old clothes that no longer fit, and all four of them slept in the same room. It got emptier.

It was Caduceus and Clarabelle left, when Colton and Calliope had gone. They used to hug at night, head on the same pillow, and Caduceus would think:  _ I am a crowded person. There is space in me for multitudes.  _

And then he was alone. 

Caleb and Essek offer to accompany him to the Blooming Grove, but he declines. They are going to Emon, taking a circuitous and indulgent route through Wildemount, but Caduceus is not stupid. They don’t hold hands in front of anyone, and they don’t touch, but ever since they battled through Aeor with Essek by their side, Caleb’s eyes have been drawn to him, over and over again, as though if he looks away for too long Essek will have vanished. There has been no mention of either of Caleb’s old friends, either. And Essek looks at him with such aching disbelief that Caduceus feels like he should leave them in private to their feelings - 

“You go ahead,” he says, when they’re inside the Empire again, on the Amber Road. He grasps his staff, his thumb slipping through the grooves where his great-great-great grandfather held the very same spot, “I have some walking to do.”

He watches them go. He sits at the side of the road. He eats an apple. 

And then he is alone. 

Caduceus has experienced more in the last year of his life than ever before, and that confuses him. He has lived almost a century by his own estimation, and by the marks his parents have kept in the wood scarring walls of the Blooming Grove, but then it all gets a bit messy when they go. His memory dips in and out. He spends days, weeks even, sitting in the same spot. 

He broke a bone when he was alone. 

Time is hard to judge, when you live in a wood where the trees are almost too thickly clustered to see the sun. The aching corruption oozes through the trunks, into the leaves, and when it rained the water is black, and Caduceus spent days of his life tending the graves after these disastrous monsoons of sickness - he brushed moss from the crawling stones, and he talked to them all by name, and he took their leaves when they gave them up. A small amount of them he knew, and helped to inter himself, and those he took special care with - Dirrana. Her wife. Their family plot. Their tea is sweet and comforting. 

His broken bone, yes. He was injured quite a lot in those years, when he was alone. He never noticed. 

Sometimes it would be a trip, a fall, gripping the wrong twist of branches, thorns tearing through the skin on his hands and his knuckles through the dusty fur on his palm. He submerged his hand in the spring and the Wildmother healed him because her love is endless, and he drowned in her, and he saw himself for what he was; treasured, her child, one seed among many. If he died, she would be sad, and she would bury him herself, and another child would take his place. 

He broke his bone walking through the Savalirwood. 

When he reaches Zadash he calls into Pumat Sol and they have tea together, sitting on the floor of the Invulnerable Vagrant. Pumat is just himself, and he looks tired. “Tell you what, friend, there’s some activity in the Assembly,” he says, looking shifty. “That pal of yours. He’s making waves.”

“He does that,” Caduceus says. It’s easy to picture Caleb elevated and robed, regal and detached but passionate, trying to save the country one spell at a time. “Should we be worried?”

“Not yet,” Pumat drinks his tea and puts his heavy, warm paw on Caduceus’s shoulder, “I’ll tell you when it happens, though. All respect to the Assembly and that, but I know where my money is.”

In those days, Caduceus went weeks without eating, sleeping, or drinking. He slipped into a semi-meditative state, allowing himself just enough mobility to tend to the graves, but he was dead walking; sometimes he would catch sight of himself in brief moments of clarity, reflections in the poolwater, and he would see this dead firbolg creature, this thing with no life in its eyes, as it walked from place to place. Caduceus saw none of himself inside that thing. 

The weeks wasted his body from his bones, and that was the only problem. One day he woke up and he didn’t know how long it had been since his last coherent thought, but the sky was a different colour and there was a fresh coating of fallen leaves on the ground, when last he knew it had been snowing. Months. He wasn’t strong enough to lift anything, even his own body, and when he rolled out of bed his wrist made a sickening  _ crack,  _ and his leg, too. It took him two days to drag himself to the spring. 

Melora scolded him the way a mother might. He took it obediently - he was never the child to run away from punishment - and she healed him, she fixed him, she wrapped him up in broad leaves and kissed the top of his head and told him he was as beloved to her as every star in the sky. 

He tended the graves. He wondered how many years it had been. 

He had forgotten to keep count. 

In those days, Caduceus would go months without speaking. He walked to Shadycreek Run every half-year or so, when his clothes became too ragged, or when he lost something he needed to live. He suspected - still suspects - that Melora had a hand in it. She forced human contact. 

He spoke. He introduced himself, he paid the necessary, he accepted the necessary. People stared at him, this lumbering, heavy pink thing with the staff of an old man and the voice of a rusty crow. He remembered them. He cradled the interactions in his arms, like children, the memories he raised to be something more than they were.  _ Riff, who sold me cabbage seeds and who smiled when I made a joke. Fern, a child who asked me to play dice in the mud of the street and who hugged my leg when I agreed.  _

He told the Wildmother all these things, and she listened. 

That was the whole fucking problem. 

In Zadash, he sees Marion, too. She had been in Nicodranas when they all were, back in the Chateau, but Babenon has pet wizards of his own, teleport spells at the snap of his beringed blue hands, and - 

“I’m not so scared anymore,” she says, her soft red fingers on Caduceus’s wrist. She is in the Evening Nip, dressed down for the occasion, wrapped in a brown gown that doesn’t suit her; even now she draws eyes. She folds under the attention. “I needed to control it,” she says to him, poised perfectly even though her hand shakes when she lifts her glass to her lips, “When I commanded it, I felt safe. I’m touching you now.”

“I can see that,” Caduceus agrees easily. It’s an easy thing to see. Carefully, gently, he lifts her hand from his arm and places it on the bar. “Jester-”

“I am not talking about Jester,” Marion says, but she drinks, and she kisses him on the nose when he leaves, and he embarks alone again. Nobody will attack him. The Wildmother won’t let them. 

He hallucinated often. Caduceus didn’t understand, still doesn’t, the stigma behind hallucination as a sign of loneliness, above everything else. He hurt himself, he  _ was  _ hurt, but the images his mind conjured up were only ever that. Images. 

It was Calliope most often. She was his best friend growing up - Colton was too, of course he was, and when Clarabelle arrived she was nearest and dearest to the aching expanse of his heart, but Colton was too tall and Clarabelle too tiny. Calliope told Caduceus he was stupid, and embraced him, and he braided her hair and healed her bruises and told her she was a moron and they fell out of trees and laughed and played cards and throwing-bones and jacks and marbles, tangled in a heap of inside jokes and paws and humour. 

He was walking the perimeter of the Grove, tracing his staff along the corruption in places, healing what he could, praying over what he couldn’t. Calliope emerged from the trees, trailing black sludge, a smile on her face, “Caduceus!”

He knew it wasn’t her immediately. The hair. The fuzziness around the edges. It had been a while at this point, several cycles of winter at least, and Caduceus was starting to forget how his family looked in the spaces that didn’t matter; under the armpits, at the balls of the feet, inside the cuticles. “Hallo,” he said anyway, because he had been raised to be polite to all birds, beasts, and creatures, regardless of their tether to reality. It hurt his throat. 

He wondered often if he would die before they returned. 

The hallucinations happened infrequently, but they were unpleasant when they did, and sent Caduceus into a spiral that would last anywhere from a few hours to a month or more. He bore the weight of them, though. 

What else was he going to do? “Hallo,” he said. “Caduceus,” they said. 

He imagined it like a well-worn daydream. He would settle in his favourite seat, the soft moss by the spring, and he would simply sit still until the moss clambered up his body and rooted inside it, fungus sprouting perhaps in a way that would please it, the forest taking back what it owned. His parents would be at the front of the group, walking, talking, discussing how good it would be to be home, to come back to life as it was before, but Calliope would see him first. “Caduceus,” she would call, and run forward, and embrace him, perhaps, and then his head would fall from his shoulders, a petrified mockery of a body sitting cross-legged by the spring. 

He imagined it over and over again until it was a script in his head. When he heard those desperate voices in the woods that day, he first thought it was them - foolish, Caduceus, don’t you remember what your mother sounds like - and he almost panicked, because he wasn’t dead yet.  _ Give me more time, mama. Please.  _

He kept going. He did his job. 

Someone had to. 

The Amber Road is long and boring. It turns into the Glory Run Road at some point, but Caduceus has always been an awful timekeeper, and he isn’t hurrying particularly. He is alone. He is good at being alone, now. 

When they found him for the first time, he lay awake at night, listening to Jester cry. 

Caduceus cried. He was young when they left him - he is young now, by his own standards - but he realised sooner rather than later that there was nobody left to soothe him. Nobody to place their cool hands on his hot, wet cheeks, nobody to press his weeping eyes to their shoulder, nobody to coo to him and tell him he would be okay. He lay in the graveyard and wept when it rained, sometimes. 

Jester hated to cry in front of them. She still does. When he thinks back on it, on this long, long walk, he wishes he had taken her hand. She told him to keep going. She kept him from bolting. 

But now she is with Fjord, in the hot, happy sun, and Caduceus is alone. 

He keeps walking. He has run out of friends to reminisce about. 

He misses Veth desperately. 

Caduceus used to think that his whole life would be like this. He had the beginning, the raising, because every child needs to be brought up as they are, and then he was left to be alone with himself and the Wildmother. He comforted himself. Great heroes, champions of their gods, are set tasks. Monumental tasks. 

But then he left the Grove and he saw how small it was. How little it entered the thoughts of anyone else. 

And still he was alone. 

Now, walking steadily towards the Savalirwood, he has the company of the birds above him and nobody else. That is fine. He is used to it, to being part of a group that briefly flickered, that snuffed almost as fast as they were lit. He walks and he knows he is the only body walking for a hundred, a thousand miles. 

He wishes there was someone walking beside him. Someone to drink the tea he makes every day, the seven cups, the six portions poured from the steeped kettle. 

There isn’t. He walks alone. 

At the border of the Savalirwood he stops and puts his paw on the trunk of the first tree he sees and the Wildmother enters him as she always has - a welcome friend. His eyes are hot, but Caduceus does not cry, because there is nobody to see him. “I missed you,” he says aloud, to the mushrooms and the bracken and the worms. 

He fixes a smile on his face, and goes home. 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr is softlyblues !
> 
> i love caduceus so much. hes so precious to me. i love how tactfully and subtly talesin is doing this sort of thing and it always brings a lump to my throat when he talks about it.


End file.
